The Key to Growth Is Removing Friction: Interview with Corey White, Founder and CEO of Cyvatar

I recently went one on one with Corey White, founder and CEO of Cyvatar.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Corey: Thank you for having me, Adam. As you know, I'm cybersecurity veteran. I've been in cybersecurity for 28 years, and throughout that process, I think the biggest thing that contributed to me growing this business model is having done the nitty gritty work myself. I’ve done security assessments, built security programs, implemented cybersecurity products for large and global customers, and then at the same time incident response. In the industry, there's a huge gap there.

When I began my career, I would come in to work, address the incident, and I soon realized it could have been easily prevented if companies just had the basics in place. I realized the biggest attack surface is small to medium size companies. I ended up veiling security companies. A lot of my best friends are CISOs, who are responsible for cybersecurity at their companies. I was the one doing their cybersecurity for them, and they kept getting hacked. I felt like I was failing. I had to build a solution that got companies to an outcome I could stand behind, put my reputation and my name behind, and say we actually helped them prevent these attacks.

Fast forward to the present, I recently reported to one of our larger customers that they had 22 ransomware incidents… that did NOT happen. We're able to do pre-forensics and get our customers to a secure state.

Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?

Corey: In my experience, the key to growth is removing friction. Customers want things quickly, easily, and to understand your value prop. So we remove friction and make it easy for our customers to get to a quick outcome and maintain that outcome.

Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?

Corey: When you're building, leading, and managing teams, the team comes first. If you're customer first but you're not employee first, you're going to potentially have upset employees serving your customers. If you take care of employees, you’re also taking care of your customers at the same time. But if you try to just take care of your customers and don't take care of employees, you fail.

Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?

Corey: Well, as it relates to cybersecurity, you need comprehensive cybersecurity. There's a lot of detect and respond type companies and products out there, but they’re not trying fix the root cause of the problem… and that's absolutely what needs to be done. They’re just going to send you an alert when something bad happens and then you have to go and fix it yourself. That's why attacks are going up 27% each year. That's what's broken in the industry, and it’s one of the challenges we decided to fix.

Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?

Corey: I think it’s just one, and that’s empathy. You have to have empathy for your employees and for your customers.

Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Corey: Continually challenge yourself to be better. Figure out, and get feedback, from your existing employees. What am I missing? What can I do better? You got to get to the point where you have a relationship where they feel comfortable telling you that. I actively encourage all my employees to tell me if I'm missing something. I don't want to be that idiot executive up there speaking and saying something that isn’t making any sense, and then no one's comfortable telling me. We're all in this together. It cannot be an adversarial relationship. We're all one team. That's the goal to building a good leader.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Corey: Number one: If you have the right business, the right a solution, never give up. People tend to give up right before they're about to succeed, and so never give up. Fight to the very end but giving up is not an option.

The second is to know yourself. You really cannot be successful unless you know yourself. I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know myself so I can better understand what's going to work for me and what my limitations are and what makes me thrive. That’s critical.

And the last one is to take good care of your health. If you work so hard that you aren't taking care of your mental and/or physical health, you cannot be successful. There will be too many distractions and setbacks. I meditate every single day and that helps keep me sane.

Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?

Corey: We have evolved to a world of relationship sales. People buy from who they know and trust. They may not actually know them personally, but from social media, their website, and other forms of digital presence, you have to become a known entity. That's going to help with sales and marketing. Those two tie together.

For digital marketing, it’s all about getting the word out and getting visible. And what's great about today, there’s social media, there's podcasts, there are so many things you can do to actually get the word out about yourself and your business without having to pay an extensive amount of money. You just have to deliver on those tools and leverage them.

With branding, you have to build a brand around who you are and it has to be authentic. For me, it was effortless because I love music. I'm a big Prince fan and my business brand ties into what I like to do. When we have an event, we have DJs.  Our company colors are purple. I'm very comfortable and authentic in our brand because they are one and the same. It shouldn’t be something you build that you think other people will like; you have to build it around yourself to make it authentic.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Corey: I literally had an Uber driver repeatedly remind me of this yesterday (we got into a really deep conversation), but he kept saying “do not be afraid.” So, whenever I'm afraid, which I'm fearful all the time, I have to remind myself to not be.

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Corey: Thank you for having me!


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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